Sheila screamed and I jumped up. Then I heard the words.
“I’ve got something.”
I rushed to the radio room. She was hunched forward, one hand on a dial and the other working the computer touch pad. “It’s faint, but it’s real.”
“I leaned toward the speaker and I could hear the words. English, I was sure, but just at the threshold of my hearing. Almost inaudible, almost understandable, but there amid the pops and crackles of the static.
Josh arrived, quickly studied the situation and then made a move to push Sheila out of her chair so that he could take over at the radio.
She shot him an annoyed glance and said, “I can do this. Just give me a chance.”
With that the words came through loud and clear and in English.
“This is the Mars Colony. Do you read? This is the Mars colony. Can anyone hear us?”
“Where’s Mars?” asked Josh.
I thought that a stupid question, but then David, who had now arrived, said, “On the far side of the sun from us. About as far away as it could be.”
I made a quick calculation. Sunlight reached Earth in about eight and a half minutes. That meant that for a radio signal to reach across, from our position in the Solar System to just the orbit of Earth on the far side was about seventeen minutes, and then tack on the distance from Earth to Mars and we were looking at something like twenty-five minutes between signals, or about an hour for a reply to anything we said.
Sheila used the mic and said, “This is the United States Space Station and we read you loud and clear. Please relay your message.”
She sat back then and took her hands away from the radio equipment as if she would hear back immediately. The she sighed because she suddenly understood the time delay.
Josh looked at the clock and asked, “How long?”
“About an hour.”
David, who’d finally arrived, said, “You know, we can anticipate what they’re going to ask and provide them with a long analysis of the situation on Earth as we’ve seen it here. Give them the full story.”
“Wouldn’t they already know?”
“They probably have some idea that there has been a disaster but they might not understand the magnitude of it given their distance from everything and the point of Mars in its orbit. Much would have been masked by the sun. Their equipment probably wouldn’t be pulling much off the commercial broadcast bands when they were operating and there was been very little official traffic before the asteroid hit. Certainly they wouldn’t have been able to see anything.”
Sheila turned to look up at him and asked, “So what do we say?”
David took a couple of steps forward and leaned one elbow on the top of the main radio console. He closed his eyes for a few moments and then said, “Tell them that there has been a major meteoric impact on Earth with a number of lesser strikes. Africa and Asia have been heavily damaged with great loss of life. Tell them that things are bad on both American continents and that the coasts have been inundated, but nothing as bad as in the Old World. Tell them that we have limited and sporadic communications with Earth but we have nothing from any governmental or official source.”
“You’re painting a pretty bleak picture,” I said.
“They have no chance of ever returning to Earth,” said David.
“That’s not true,” I said. “They have their return vehicle parked in orbit and they have the means to return. They need nothing from us, or NASA to get back.”
David held up a hand to concede the point. “Yes, of course. I think we need to tell them that they’re on their own. They have a much better chance of survival than we do. Their mission was planned with years of supplies and they’re on a planet’s surface where they can find some resources to help them. They’re not orbiting it in a tin can that holds only what we brought with us, or that was brought up to us.”
There was a startled sound from Sheila that was something between a gasp and a choke. She stared at David as if he had just told her that her family was dead, though, in one sense he had, if she hadn’t figured that out for herself. He’d also expressed the problem with our situation, though she might not have figured that out yet.
Well, I was sure that she had figured it out, but hadn’t accepted it as reality. To her, at the moment, there were options, including returning to Earth as David had said. She just wasn’t thinking about the future. She was buried in the here and now.
He said, “Listen, we have to convince them that now is not the time for them to return. They need to let their mission run its course and then return on schedule if they want to try that. Three or four years from now the conditions on Earth will have improved greatly if for no other reason than the atmosphere has cleared.”
I chuckled at that because I figured it was going to take a couple of centuries for things to improve much. I also realized at that point that we weren’t the only hope for the survival of the human race, though the race might have to adapt itself to life on Mars and that those on Mars were going to have a rough time regenerating it.
That, I figured, wasn’t going to be easy because, even with the warming of the Martian climate, it was cold and the atmosphere held very little in the way of oxygen. Unless they figured out a way to pump the stuff out of the ground, they wouldn’t be living outside their protected areas for very long.
And they needed to find a good source of water. Sure we knew there was water on Mars, had seen the evidences of it, but they had to be able to get to it, and that might not be as easy as everyone thought.
David said, “Tell them what I said.”
Sheila glanced at me as if wanting my approval and I merely nodded.
David said, “Don’t ask him. Just do it.”
She turned and leaned toward the mic and began a short recitation of what David had said.
Sarah, who hadn’t responded to Sheila’s first call appeared and asked, “What have I missed.”
We told her and she glanced at the clock. “Be an hour before we hear anything?”
“More or less.”
“Then I have some other things to do.”
I could see no point in standing around watching the little lights on the front panel of the communications equipment for an hour and I followed her off, toward the lounge.